How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like

The average American spends more than four hours a day watching television. Abstract art can sell for millions of dollars. People slow their cars to look at gory accidents, and go to movies that make them cry. Pleasure is anything but straightforward. Our desires, attractions and tastes take us beyond the symmetry of a beautiful face, the sugar and fat in food, or the prettiness of a painting. Drawing on child development, philosophy, neuroscience and behavioral economics, Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom refutes the longstanding explanation of pleasure as a simple sensory response, and shows us that it is grounded in our beliefs about the deeper nature or essence of a given thing. Bloom gives us unprecedented insights into a realm of human psychology that until now has only been partially understood. Q&A and book signing to follow. Presented by JCC Greenwich.